Francis Gurtowski

Beyond Anagrams Francis Gurtowski

By "palette" I mean a spelling shorn of duplicate instances of letters. Such essences are as far beyond anagrams as anagrams are beyond words. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet are the ultimate palette, but I know of no such word employing at least one instance of each. The longest palettes I could find are fourteen letters in length: abcehlmorstuxy abceilmnorstuy abdeilmorstuxy acdefhilmnortu acdeghilmortuy acefilmnoprstv aceghilmnoprty aceghilnoprsuy acegilmorstuvy acehilmnoprtuy adeghilmnostyz adehilnoprstuz adeilmnorstuvy aeghilmnortuwy bcehilmnoprsty cdeghilmnopruy ceghilnoprstuyFor example, bcehilmnoprsty is the palette of this threesome: comprehensibility incomprehensibility intercomprehensibilityI culled 74,582 mid-length words (from five to twelve letters in length) from a batch of 85,086 words (from two to twenty-five letters long). I use this curatorial subset of words first as clues and ultimately as solutions in a new genre of games of crisscrossed words. The 10,504 words dropped are too short or too long for my purposes. I prefer the gamesmanship within the Goldilocks Zone of words. I am left with 42,356 palettes, 69,563 anagrams and 74,582 words. The entire palette-anagram-word hierarchy is enumerated in this reference volume. As a last resort, look up in the forest of trees the clues to the aforementioned puzzles. The crisscross-eligible words are bona fide dictionary items of the garden-variety sort. The orthographic constituents of these orthogonal trifles are spelled out in Merriam-Webster using lowercase letters only